The Patriot Post® · Americans Lose Faith in So-Called Experts
Americans are increasingly losing faith in so-called government and corporate media experts. According to a recent Pew Research survey, only about one-quarter of Americans say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (2 percent) or “most of the time” (22 percent). Among Republicans and those who lean Republican that number is just 5 percent.
A separate survey by PR giant Edelman’s annual trust barometer shows trust in traditional media has declined to an all-time low.
56% of Americans agree with the statement that “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
58% think that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.”
When Edelman re-polled Americans after the election, the figures had deteriorated even further, with 57% of Democrats trusting the media and only 18% of Republicans.
Additionally, according to Edelman, trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%.
Faith in society’s central institutions, especially in government and the media, is the glue that holds society together. That glue was visibly dissolving a decade ago, and has now, for many millions of Americans, disappeared entirely.
This is a huge problem because as we all know, the overwhelming majority of lawmaking at the federal level no longer takes place in Congress as the Constitution’s framers intended. Instead, the vast majority of the “rulemaking” governing Americans’ day-to-day lives now takes place behind closed doors, deep in the bowels of the administrative state’s sprawling bureaucracy. These are the very people that failed us so spectacularly over the past 15 months of the COVID pandemic.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is Exhibit A for the failure of government experts. Last June, in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ podcast “Learning Curve” Fauci accused a large swathe of Americans of having an “anti-science bias.”
“One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are — for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable — they just don’t believe science and they don’t believe authority,” Fauci said.
“So when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who’s talking about science, that there are some people who just don’t believe that — and that’s unfortunate because, you know, science is truth,” Fauci said. “That’s really a problem.”
According to Timothy Daughtry, a PhD consultant on corporate leadership, the real problem is that conservatives, whom he said are inclined by nature to trust authority and institutions, have lost faith in our institutions.
“Conservatives are predisposed to trust authority and trust the Constitution, the Bible, rule of law, police, and so forth,” explained Daughtry. “So, this tells me there is something else going on. People are beginning to see that authority is being abused. It’s being politicized. It’s being used to further a political agenda. When you think about the two major outcomes of COVID, first it crashed the Trump economy and second it set the stage for mass mail-in voting, a very controversial means of voting.”
You don’t need an expert to tell you that these two things had a huge impact on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and contributed greatly to the loss of faith in the so-called experts.
In 2020, independent reporting by Project Veritas exposed both corporate media corruption and voting fraud.
Mario Balaban, media relations manager at Project Veritas, said it’s a good thing that more Americans are skeptical of the experts because they are so often wrong.
“The so-called experts in mainstream media are the least trustworthy sources in my opinion,” said Balaban. Don’t take what these mainstream reporters or these government officials say, blindly without doing some research on your own, always try to do some more digging,“ Balaban added. "And use your common sense. You can tell when you know they’re trying to push a narrative.”
Balaban says Project Veritas hopes that as more Americans seek truth from independent sources, it will lead to change. “It comes down to the public’s will to make the change they want to see.”